“When California was wild, it was one sweet bee garden throughout its entire length, north and south, and all the way across from the snowy Sierra to the ocean.” ~John Muir, “The Bee Pastures”

Welcome to the Los Angeles County Beekeepers Association, founded in 1873, to foster the interest of bee culture and beekeeping within Los Angeles County. Our primary purpose is the care and welfare of the honeybee. Our group membership is composed of commercial and small scale beekeepers, bee hobbyists, and bee enthusiasts. So whether you came upon our site by design or just 'happened' to find us - we're glad you're here! Our club and this website are dedicated to educating our members and the general public. We support honeybee research, and adhering to best management practices for the keeping of bees.

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Honeybee workers spend their whole lives toiling for their hives, never ascending to the royal status of queens. But they can change careers. At first, they’re nurses, which stay in the hive and tend to their larval sisters. Later on, they transform into foragers, which venture into the outside world in search of flowers and food.

This isn’t just a case of flipping between tasks. Nurses and foragers are very distinct sub-castes that differ in their bodies, mental abilities, and behaviour – foragers, for example, are the ones that use the famous waggle dance. “[They’re] as different as being a scientist or journalist,” explains Gro Amdam, who studies bee behaviour. “It’s really amazing that they can sculpt themselves into those two roles that require very specialist skills.” The transformation between nurse and forager is significant, but it’s also reversible. If nurses go missing, foragers can revert back to their former selves to fill the employment gap.

Amdam likens them to the classic optical illusion (shown on the right) which depicts both a young debutante and an old crone. “The bee genome is like this drawing,” she says. “It has both ladies in it. How is the genome able to make one of them stand out and then the other?

The answer lies in ‘epigenetic’ changes that alter how some of the bees’ genes are used, without changing the underlying DNA. Amdam and her colleague Andrew Feinberg found that the shift from nurse to forager involves a set of chemical marks, added to the DNA of few dozen genes. These marks, known as methyl groups, are...